Hero Takes a Fall
Having gotten some feedback and the chance to revise my first six chapters, I'm back to working on 21 Faces, with the latest chapter below the cut.



An argument boomed down the narrow steps, warning me of the trouble ahead. Robin had visitors and had left her office door ajar. Returning from my adventure at the funeral home, I tilted my head, listening to the shouts from upstairs. Someone had turned on the thunder and directed it at Robin. A man’s voice – familiar, although I hadn’t heard it in this lifetime.

“I hired your man to find out where she was, not fuck her and punch out my brother!”

Robin’s voice remained level, calm as a dam against a raging river. “Mr. Stevens, if you don’t calm down, I’m going to rethink our business arrangement.”

I started up the narrow steps while the argument continued. I walked slowly, making sure not to make too much noise with my hard-soled shoes on the wooden stairs.

“You don’t have to rethink anything! You’re done. I want my money back, and I’m turning you and your partner into the cops the first chance I get!”

“Two things, Mr. Stevens. First, if you don’t tell your ‘brother’ to step back and stop trying to intimidate me, he’s going to find up missing his left testicle. Second, if you even thought approaching the police was an option, you wouldn’t have called me up in the first place. I don’t appreciate idle threats…not when we can still do business.”

“Still do business?! What do you—”

The creak of Robin’s office door interrupted the shouting match. Robbin remained sitting at her desk, hands folded neatly in front of her. She glanced across the room at me over the rims of her spectacles. Two men stood in front of her, with their backs toward me. Both turned their head toward the door as I stepped into the room. I recognized the silent one immediately. His head was only a few inches from brushing against the ceiling and his eyes had black and blue circles around them from our tussle the night before. I remembered introducing him to the floor when he came bursting into Mona’s hotel room. The other one was shorter, but still taller than me. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a bushy brown mustache. I didn’t know his name, but I immediately knew two things about him: I had met him before, and I didn’t like him.

“You little bastard!” The tall one shifted and took a step toward me, but wasn’t as aggressive as he had been the night before. A quiet part of my brain picked up important signs: he turned slowly, somewhat off balance as he favored his right leg. One hand swung naturally, while the other stayed too close to his body, hovering inches away from his black jacket. He had a gun in his pocket.

Robin’s office didn’t allow for much mobility, which worked to my advantage this time. In the close quarters, I managed to take a few steps and get close to my would-be attacker before he could react. His hand slipped into his pocket to draw the pistol, but I swung with my right arm first. The gun made him sloppy – gave him a sense of invulnerability. He forgot what a fast punch to the neck could do. He gave a croak and fell backwards. The gun slipped out of his grasp and slid across the floor. I saw its shape out of the corner of my eye, and my mind immediately categorized it for me. A snub-nosed revolver, probably a family heirloom or something picked up from an underhanded pawn shop. While my subconscious fed me information about the firearm, I put my knee on my victim’s chest, reminding him of where he stood with me.

“I told you what would happen if I saw you again,” I hissed. The voice sounded more menacing than anything I had expected. It didn’t seem like I was the person actually talking.

“Get off of him,” came a yell from next to me. The other man gave me a shove, sending me toppling backwards. I sprang up less than a second later, ready for a fight. He flinched as soon as I drew my fist back and shied away from me.

“That is enough!” Robin’s authoritarian voice ended the scuffle. More than just an order, her command became a threat as she stepped away from her desk and picked up the thug’s dropped handgun. She held it upright, barrel pointed toward the ceiling, but all of us got the fast sense that she could aim and fire with the best of them if it came down to it.

For my own part, I couldn’t help but smile at the scene. Two men, both bigger and stronger than me, cowering in fear at what I could do with only one hand. Who knew I could kick some ass?

The man with the mustache pointed at me, his eyes wild. “I hired you to find someone, not to turn this psycho loose on us!”

“If I’m not mistaken, Mr. Stevens, Eddie did find your wife.”

“A fat lot of good that did!”

“He found her, which means he could find her again if he wanted to. You’ve just got to motivate him properly.”

“Motivate him? You’re lucky I don’t call the cops for what he’s pulled!”

Robin marched back to her desk and sat down. She pointed the gun barrel toward the ground this time. Even as she shifted her position, she never pointed the weapon at any of us.

“If the police were an option for you in the first place, Clint, you wouldn’t have been looking for a third party investigator. It’s a pretty open and shut case, after all. Your wife runs off with half your life savings. That’s grand theft, at least. But police ask pesky questions like, where did all that money come from in the first place and, why wasn’t it reported to the IRS?”

Unable to meet Robin’s accusations, Stevens just glared at his fallen companion. “Get off the floor, Mike. You look ridiculous.”

“As for Michael here,” Robin turned her sharp eyes on the clumsy man trying to pick himself up, “I told him about Eddie’s whereabouts because I thought something might have happened. I didn’t ask him to jump to the conclusion that my investigator was running off with your wife, and I certainly didn’t ask for him to attack anyone at the scene. I’d ask for an apology, but I think Eddie has already taught you both a bit of a lesson in undue use of force. The universe tends to balance itself out that way.”

“You’ve got some gall, lady,” hissed Mr. Stevens. “You’re sitting here reprimanding me when the stunts you pulled could land you and this dick in jail.”

“If you want to invite trouble, go ahead and report us to the police,” replied Robin icily.

The two men shifted uneasily under Robin’s glare and said nothing. After a few moments of this comforting unease, I cleared my throat. All eyes in the room shifted toward me.

“Not to get in the way of my boss’s very good grip on the situation, but she’s wrong about one thing. I won’t be out searching for Mona again. If you want to find her, do it yourself.”

“You arrogant son of—” Mr. Stevens – Mona’s husband, I reminded myself – leaned to take a threatening step toward me. I raised my good hand and made a fist with it. He stopped dead in his tracks.

“I don’t know a lot about you, but I know you’re way out of your league.” I spoke slowly, making sure that the man got the meaning behind every word. “You’ve got this trained pachyderm here to frighten people, but all he’s got going for himself is his size. He doesn’t know how to use any of his strength, and neither do you. You’re not some powerful mob boss. You’re not someone who commands any respect from me at all. You’re a small man who has no idea what he’s dealing with. I don’t know why your wife ran off, but I know she’s running from something far more dangerous than you. She’s not coming back, and I’m not going to help you look for her. You can make all the petty threats you want, but sooner or later that’s going to lead us toward violence. You’ve both seen what I can do when I’m in one of these…unpleasant moods.”

If Robin’s glare earlier had been ice, mine was brimstone. I kept my fist clenched as though it were the detonator to a bomb. Both of the men stared at it and started sweating bullets. Then Mr. Stevens took a step back.

“Give my brother back his gun. We’re done here.”

“The gun stays with me,” responded Robin. “I seem to be the only one here who knows how to handle it properly.”

Neither man spent any time arguing. They stomped out of the office and slammed the door, trying to replace their lost dignity with noise and fury. Once they got out of sight, though, they took off running. Robin and I heard their hurried steps as they streaked down the stairs and out into the streets, away from the hornet’s nest they had stirred up.

I lowered my fist and turned toward Robin with a smile on my face. She raised the gun and pointed it at me.

“If I didn’t know it wouldn’t do me any good, I’d put two bullets right between your eyes,” she barked. “You’ve made a serious mess of things today, Eddie.”

I raised my left hand, showing off the scarlet-tinged gauze that I had wrapped around it. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.”

“Hm. So did your trip through the looking glass bring you back? Or have you just gone loopy from blood loss?”

“Can’t it be both?”

Robin placed the gun on her desk, the barrel pointing away from us both. Then she took off her glasses and rubbed her hands over her face.

“I told you not to go looking at your reflection,” she said. “You’re lucky Naomi didn’t kill you.”

“Who is she, anyway?”

“Someone dangerous. That’s all that’s important.” She sighed and put her glasses back on. “Tell me about Mona.”

A shiver ran through my body as I thought of her. “Mona…”

“Yes, Mona. The woman Clint Stevens is certain you slept with. The case that would have paid for this office space for the rest of the year.”

A picture on a wall. In my mind’s eye I press my lips to an oil painting. It tastes like strawberries.

My knees buckled sending me stumbling forward. I caught myself on the edge of Robin’s desk as my vision blurred.

“Eddie? Are you okay?”

Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time…

I closed my eyes and shook my head. Trembling with the effort, I pushed myself back into a standing position.

“Mona is…gone,” I said, my mind distant.

“What did you see when you looked in the mirror?” I felt Robin touch my shoulder. She had gotten up from her chair and moved around the desk to stand beside me. Why hadn’t I seen her do that?

“She’s the one I’ve been looking for.” I turned to face the dingy office wall and waved vaguely at the peeling paint. “I saw her picture, up on a wall.”

“What wall? Where?”

I let my arms drop to my side, then shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. It was just a dream.”

“But Mona herself is important, right? Do you know where she is?”

“Not anymore.” I held up my left hand and looked at the bandages around my wound. “But I knew who she was, even before I found her. I knew where to meet her. I went to the hotel with a glove on my hand. I didn’t want you to see what I was doing.”

“We’ve established that part.”

“Then that big ape came bursting through the door.”

“My fault,” said Robin. “I knew where you were going, but nothing else. When I couldn’t track you, I thought something might have happened. I told our client that you had tracked his wife to the Ligea. Seems he got the wrong message.”

“No…he knew what we were doing. Mona and I showered together. We drank wine. I had no intention of letting her husband know where she was.” I tilted my head and looked into Robin’s eyes. Her irises had tiny flecks of gold in them. “I didn’t even want you knowing about her.”

“Eddie, we don’t have to make this a case. If Mona is the person you’ve been looking for, we can find her. The important thing is getting the two of you together.”

“We can’t do that. I didn’t get pushed off that roof by Mike or any other big ape. I jumped.”

“Why would you do that?”

“You know perfectly well why. I wanted to forget.”

Robin’s hands dropped to her sides. She stood up straight and her eyes lit up in anger. “You stupid fool! You don’t know what you just did!”

“Someone is after her. Someone more dangerous than a jealous husband.”

“Then it’s your job to protect her!”

“I can’t protect her.” I held up my left hand again. “I can’t even protect myself – not when I can barely figure out what’s going on. It’s been less than a day and I’ve already jumped off a roof, got my body sliced open, and had some necrophile drive a spike through my hand.” I sighed and took a quick few steps, walking in a circle around Robin’s desk. “How am I supposed to do anything effectively when I’m stuck like this?”

“Eddie, you need to calm down. We can still track her down. We’ll have you look in a mirror. If I’m standing next to you, I can—”

“We can do nothing!” I slammed my left hand against the desk and winced as the wound started bleeding again. “As of last night, I knew everything I needed. I had her right there in my arms. I felt invincible. And I tossed that away because I knew I couldn’t help her. I decided I’d rather keep her alive than see her again.”

Robin remained silent. She gave me time to catch my breath and gather my thoughts. Then I looked at my feet – at shoes I had stolen from a dead man.

“However we were going before she came into the picture, that’s how we should stay,” I said in a calmer tone. “I’m going to let Mona disappear and wish her luck.”

“I can’t let you do that, Eddie.”

“It’s already done. I’ve already forgotten. Let’s just move on. I’m more concerned right now with the woman who tried to dissect me in a funeral home.”

Robin nodded, surrendering the conversation and moving on. “Naomi’s a problem. You’re lucky to have gotten away from her.”

“How often have I met her before?”

“She’s known you almost as long as I have. She just doesn’t have the same attachment to you that I do. But don’t worry about that right now. Let’s head to the basement. I’ll patch that hand up for you and fix your stitches. We can figure out what to do about Mona after that.”

Following Robin’s directions, I turned and started toward the door. “I told you, there’s nothing we can do about Mona. Let’s just move on.”

I heard a metallic click as I reached the door. Turning around, I saw Robin with the revolver in her hand again. She had pulled the hammer back and pointed it at me.

“I told you, Eddie. I can’t let you do that.”

Then she shot me in the head.